Mood tracking for bipolar disorder

Here’s a personal insight into how mood tracking can be beneficial for bipolar disorder and other mood disorders.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about mood tracking using the eMoods app which you can read here. The following graphs show how my moods changed earlier this year over a period of about six months:

Note: I drew up these graphs with specialised software (GraphPad Prism), this is not something you can do with the app!

What have I learned from tracking my moods so far? 

I’ll go through those graphs here in a little more detail so you can see the observations I’ve been able to make.

Two things are immediately obvious to me from my mood graph. Firstly, I had two main episodes of illness in the time shown – mania at the beginning and a mild to moderate depression in the winter – with a phase of stability (euthymia) in-between where I had few to no symptoms. Secondly, irritability coincided with mood symptoms of either high or low states, meaning it’s a red flag I should watch as a sign I might be relapsing in the future.

One of the first important things I noticed by tracking moods and meds was just how frequently I was forgetting to take meds. It was easy to see how this caused my mood to remain turbulent – mood symptoms coincided with the times I was forgetting meds. I took steps to ensure I was remembering to take my meds every single day – for me this was simply allocating the pills into a weekly pill box and keeping them in my handbag so they’d be on-hand if I had already left the house before remembering.

Another important observation is the relationship between the dose of venlafaxine (also called Effexor-XR) I was taking and my mood. At 150 mg daily I experienced mania which was fixed quickly by forcing sleep with quetiapine which has a sedative effect and lowering the dose of venlafaxine near the beginning of February. Later, when I tried to wean off of venlafaxine in May my bipolar symptoms returned, fueling the decision to up the dose again.

Sleep is another very important thing I realised was out of order during mood episodes. I’ve worked really hard with medications and routine to make my sleep more consistent. I do yoga in the evenings and use meditation to improve the quality of my sleep. You can see although it is still a bit up and down that I’m getting much closer to the recommended 8 hrs of sleep most nights, as opposed to how low and variable the graph was trending at the time I started tracking it!

Benefits of mood tracking

As I’ve shown above, mood tracking can help reveal patterns in cause and effect in your life. Oftentimes I’m far less aware than I should be of chronic issues like lack of sleep. I’ll think I’ve just had a couple of bad nights sleep but when I having charts in front of me I can see when it’s been a problem for longer than I remember or the severity is worse than I’ve made it out to be in my head. The charts don’t lie!

Giving a copy of my chart to my doctors is extremely helpful to them in that they have a quick summary of what’s been going on lately. It means the events laid out to my doctor are less biased by my mood at the time of the appointment and important things aren’t forgotten about.

What are your experiences with mood tracking?

I’d love to hear what mood apps you’re using in the comments and rate them for others! Let us know what other methods (eg. a diary) you use to track moods and how mood tracking has or hasn’t helped you!

Lots of us start tracking and inevitably stop because we just forget too often, lose interest or find it’s too difficult or not useful to us. What has helped you to remember or made it easier to log these changes every day?